Talks on a $700 billion rescue for the US financial system fell into chaos amid accusations Rezpublican presidential candidate John McCain scuppered the deal, and US authorities closed Washington Mutual and sold its assets in America's biggest ever bank failure. President George W. Bush made a fresh appeal for Congress to move quickly on his proposal for the program to stabilize cascading US financial markets. Bush made a terse public statement at the White House, the day after an apparent agreement on the broad outline of a relief bill fell apart. The president said he expected that individual lawmakers would have disagreements about the details of the plan but said there is no choice but to act. “There is no disagreement that something substantial must be done,” Bush said. Central banks across the world scrambled to meet a desperate demand for cash Friday. With the renewed intensity of the financial crisis continuing to shred market confidence, the European Central Bank, Bank of England and Swiss National Bank stepped up their efforts to try and calm the situation with a new plan to pump in billions of dollars of one-week loans for the first time. As negotiations over an unprecedented bailout plan to restore credit markets degenerated into chaos, the largest US savings and loan bank was taken over by authorities and its deposits auctioned off. US stock futures fell by more than 1 percent, the dollar weakened and share markets in Asia fell. The third-largest U.S bank JPMorgan Chase & Co said it bought the deposits of Washington Mutual Inc, which has seen its stock price virtually wiped out because of massive amounts of bad mortgages. The government said there would be no impact on WaMu's depositors and customers. JPMorgan said it would be business as usual on Friday morning. Had a bailout deal been reached in Congress, it may have helped the savings and loan, founded in Seattle in 1889. Efforts to find a suitor to buy WaMu faltered in recent days over concerns about whether the government would reach a deal to buy its toxic mortgages. Unease intensified after House Republicans balked at Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson's plan to buy bad debt from banks and instead floated an idea of their own for mortgage insurance, casting the whole bailout into doubt.
